Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts snowy winter

DUBLIN, N.H. – The leaves are about to change, the geese are packing for flights south and a little yellow magazine with a hole in the corner is hitting the newsstands, just as it has for the last 213 years.

The 2006 Old Farmer’s Almanac has been released – and if its traditional “80 percent” accurate weather forecasts are on the mark, residents of the northeastern half of the country should brace for a winter that’s colder and snowier than normal.

“It’s going to be a tough winter,” Editor Janice Stillman said, “so get the shovels ready, get the mittens out, stoke the fire.”

Using a secret formula based on sunspots, weather patterns and meteorology, the almanac points to a milder-than-normal winter in the southwestern half of the country, with a warmer-than-normal summer in most areas, except the heartland and the Southeast.

Editor in Chief Jud Hale said all forecasts are important, but it’s crucial to nail the one for New England, because his neighbors are alert.

“I walk into the store down here, and if it’s really cold and snowy they say, “We don’t like this, Jud. You’ve got to do something about it.’

“I say, ‘Well, we’re having a meeting the day after tomorrow. Maybe we can change it.”

In an eerie coincidence, the almanac features a story about an American city devastated by a natural disaster and its aftermath. The anniversary story about the great San Francisco earthquake, 100 years ago in April, comes as the dead from Hurricane Katrina are still being counted.

As with Katrina, the initial calamity did not cause most of the deaths. The storm surge and levee breaks devastated New Orleans. In San Franciso, it was fires after the shaking stopped.

Stillman was taken by tales of survival and “the way people pull together and support each other through tragedies and challenges like this.”

The almanac does not pretend to predict specific hurricanes, Hale said.

Published since 1792, the Old Farmer’s Almanac is North America’s oldest continuously published periodical. Stillman said its sense of continuity keeps it popular.

“It’s a tradition in the midst of all kinds of good news and bad news, it’s reliable … and it reminds you of what went before, just how we all fit,” she said.

The magazine still has a hole in the upper left-hand corner so it can hang in outhouses and still contains astronomical information and tide charts so accurate the government considered banning them during World War II, fearing they would help German spies.

This edition also offers information on everything from cultivating vegetables and manners to surviving decades of marriage.

The marriage tips come from five siblings in a Pennsylvania family who all have been married more than 50 years.

“I learned not to expect the best all the time, that sometimes you have to settle,” said Julia Janikowski Woolfe, who has been married for 57 years.

The Emily Post Institute in Vermont offered some tips on manners, saying people are fed up with rudeness. The top complaints – loud cell phone conversations and not responding to invitations.

One of Hale’s favorite articles tells how to teach chickens to do tricks. That’s not surprising for visitors to his office, a minimuseum of odds and ends, including about three dozen chickens – “stuffed, porcelain, whatever.”